While L4D maps may be slightly dynamic, they in no way approach the size, scale, or utility of this system. This is being built for a game in which you are either defending yourself from zombies, hunting down the enemy team, or searching out resources. Players will have no choice but to wander down alleys and search out buildings if they want to survive. The real horror aspect of the game will come from these lonely missions out into unknown territories. Couple that with ambient, lone zombies (that are stronger than the weak L4D ones) and randomized pickup placements and you've got yourself a fun, replayable multiplayer map.

We realize we aren't the first people doing this, but I think repathing will have a much larger role in our gameplay than in previous titles.

You understand the expanse that the map would require for this? Most of the time, a good map will have an open view at some point, whether it be windows, higher altitudes, et cetera. How will these changes be hidden from the player?

Again, I like the idea, I'm just trying to provoke some contrasting thoughts.

Hey, fresh eyes are good. As noted in the video, we're primarily looking at a round based repathing system. Deadlock is basically a team death match. When one team is wiped out, the round resets, everyone respawns, and the map will repath.

Deadlock maps will not be linear, and will have more of a large arena/open world-ish feel. As for the scale of the map, we won't know what sizes work best until we've at least got a playable alpha. I suspect the maps will be complicated from a production point of view, but I think repathing will allow us to get more mileage out of the space we do use.

You have a lot of work to be done on this, but this is really cool. If only the original L4D had the same time as you to get this. This is a really nice system to be adding into this, now just to get the AI to work.

What about the paths that the zombies go? Don't you have to draw the spaces that are walkable? You do that in consol, in game, What if you change the layout of the map you wont have zombies able to walk there.

Please explain how you do that! Unless I have no idea what im talking about... You have a real problem!

Heh. Nah. I've been fond of procedural content since I saw it in Diablo. The Tribes guys figured out how to do procedural terrain... it's been in Hellgate London and RoboBlitz... At any rate, it's a feature that hasn't matured yet in the FPS and we'd like to tackle it. Definitely a next step for the medium.

One interesting way to make use of this type of map would be a crescendo event where the players have to perform multiple actions at different locations while under attack. Say they enter a warehouse area and, after wandering around it for a while, several fire alarms go off, calling hordes. The hordes continue to attack in endless waves until the players find all of the fire alarms and shut them off or destroy them. The fire alarms may always be in the same place, but the path to reach them would be continuously changing.

"Repaths" has been used in alot of valve mods I have made maps my self with your so called "repaths" all it is logic_case with a input of pic random and selects a outputs at random to a point_template to force spawn objects but you also have a delay on that. It also has a output from the logic_case to a entitie (probably a logic_timer)to delete that entite. Also from the logic_case you have it highlight the wall that was selected. Those triggers you speak of could be any number of triggers but they have outputs to the logic_Case which starts it all. Really you can use this method to spawn any entities in the map randomly based on events but that requires mapping skill and it can cause lag if you are missing any part of the half life 2 source files because it creates error and valve releases their source code with missing code.

Forgot to mention 1 more thing....
This is a good method but like I said it has some problems with some mods because some mods are missing those lines of code that are for entities and registering them. Specially with the orange box engine source files so if you can do not use the orange box engine code that valve released and if you are try to find out what is missing and try to fix it other wise there will be massive bugs.